Day 17: Monument Valley

We've had so many highlights on this trip -- the Menil Collection, Marfa, Carlsbad Caverns, Mesa Verde -- but Monument Valley was right up there with them.

I find it interesting that a landscape can at one and the same time feel so familiar and so alien. On the one hand, it's the very image of the Wild Wild West, as popularized by John Wayne's grandiosely romantic Westerns (nine of which were shot here), and on the other, its bizarre shapes and hues seem to hark from another planet, like Mars.